A chair project I have been sketching out for a while. Just got around to modeling it. Consistent with the X-Delta piece, this also is a single sheet of material with minimal surface intervention to the create the form. Details and more explanation to follow. Please check back.
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12 Comments
holy rendering batman.
Is this to be fabricated with one continuous piece of material? If so I don't think it can be done in a simple way. It could be done as long as the chair portion of it was cut from a longer piece of material as it appears to be needed to fabric the seating portion than the arm rest piece. It is elegant in a rendering but fabrication will be a bitch.
With the correct size extruded tube, a few strategic saw cuts and a number of custom fabricated large forming dies you could shape this in a big hydraulic press. It could also be shaped from a tube in a slip roll it the arm was cut off and welded on after the main shape was formed. Interesting reversal of process, using a slip roll to make a curve flat.
More fun would be explosive forming. The tube would be partially crushed to fit inside a form and an explosive charge would be used to press it into the correct shape. You would have to make some allowances in the shape of the form for unequal distribution of the explosive force due to distance and spring-back of the sheet material.
The cost and difficulty of such manufacturing operations would most certainly be justified by the inflexible, hard, cold and slippery surface on which one would be able to recline gracelessly.
Glad to know I'm not the only one rocking a aluminum chair at the beach.
It would be a pretty monstrous task to bend for sure. This is a formal concept. It can be achieved a number of ways all dependent on the gauge of the material. I've produced pieces using the idea of expanding the flat sheet and folding quite a bit in the past and for sure its a lot of work and I don't claim to have "perfected" a technique at this time. I was trying to minimize welding as part of the process but Miles idea of using an extruded form and welding the pieces is maybe a more direct way of approaching it.. I sometimes envision this piece a permanent part of a landscape. It would be extremely heavy but making it from a .75" piece of core ten is kind of what I had in mind.
Corten steel exterior furniture? Awesome!
Do they come with built-in with tetanus shots?
Some cushions woven from barbed wire would probably make it more comfortable.
Could be comfortable if you were pumped full of heroin prior to sitting...
The seat seems too deep for such a hard material. Most furniture that deep is upholstered or made of a soft foam and invites a person to sprawl out a little.
davvid said delicately what Miles said much more humorously: the seat looks too deep. Have you rendered in a person sitting on it yet? Or better, built a full-scale model out of cardboard and tried to sit comfortably in it?
It looks like a very attractive sculpture about chair-ness, but not a very good chair. But that's okay, a chair is honestly one of the hardest things to do well, and we need experimentation to keep good ideas coming along.
Related, ZHA recently presented this very beautiful chair:
I love it as an experiment in minimizing materials relative to structural forces. But it appears to be 3D printed out of whatever powder+binder 3D printing is done with these days and not actually capable of holding weight.
Dysfunctional and unsustainable! A virtual home run.
^Donna. It's probably done with one of the plastics now commonly used, which can be pretty strong.
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